3 March 2017
"The Reception of Blake in Germany and Austria: On the Afterlife of his Art".
The Centre will welcome guest speaker Dr Sibylle Erle, Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, to Queen Mary University of London to give a talk on "The Reception of Blake in Germany and Austria: On the Afterlife of his Art".
Date & time: Friday, 3 March 2017, 4-6pm
Venue: Room: TBC, Mile End campus, Queen Mary University of London
By the 1900s William Blake featured in articles and chapters on English Painting, and often in connection with book-illustration or the Pre-Raphaelites. According to Richard Muther, Blake’s artistic practice was the result of spontaneous and uncontrollable bursts of creative energy. Julius Meier-Graefe, by comparison, was disparaging of Blake’s visions and affinities with mysticism (Swedenborg and Böhme) altogether. The critical modelling of Blake was further propelled in the more nuanced and distinctly more positive writing of Rudolf Kassner and Helene Richter: Kassner’s Die Mystik, Die Künstler und das Leben (1900) and Richter’s William Blake (1906). Touching on the main trends in the artistic and critical responses to Blake, this paper will focus on the German-Jewish artist Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966), who belonged to the mystical wing of Expressionism.
Meidner identified with Blake. Such is the agreement in the existing literature. Thomas Grochowiak, for example, writes that, when in London in the 1940s, ‘Meidner’s most important and exciting encounter was with the works of the painter-poet-mystic William Blake’ (1966, 200). Meidner, however, claimed (repeatedly) that he had known of Blake while living in Germany. In its case study, this paper will map and re-evaluate Meidner’s responses to Blake.
Sibylle Erle, FRSA, is Senior Lecturer in English at Bishop Grosseteste University Lincoln, author of Blake, Lavater and Physiognomy (Legenda, 2010), co-editor of Science, Technology and the Senses (Special Issue for RaVoN, 2008) and volume editor of Panoramas, 1787-1900: Texts and Contexts (5 vols., Pickering & Chatto, 2012). With Morton D. Paley she is now co-editing The Reception of William Blake in Europe (Bloomsbury). She has co-curated the display “Blake and Physiognomy” (2010-11) at Tate Britain and devised an online exhibition of Tennyson’s copy of Blake’s Job for the Tennyson Research Centre (2013). Apart from reception, she is working on ‘character’ in the Romantic period.
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